Jesuit Moral Theology by Markus Friedrich

 

Theological considerations with far reaching ramifications lay behind the devotion and faith that the Jesuits propagated. And just as the religious and devotional practices of the Society of Jesus were controversial, so to was its theology. Hence the Jesuits were embroiled in several inter-Catholic theological conflicts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Theologians quarreled over penance, mercy, and the way to achieve salvation. Many of these doctrinal disputes ultimately revolved around the question of how the Catholic image of man and God should look, how one should imagine the basic mechanisms of gaining salvation, and especially what consequences that had on the practice of religion and pastoral ministry in everyday life.

Different views of penance and remorse, for example, lurked behind the conflict between the rigorists and the Jesuits. The two adversaries agreed that divine forgiveness always had to be based on the sinner’s remorse for his wrongdoing. But there were two contrary concepts as to what constituted remorse: attritio and contritio. Attritio meant that one regretted one’s sins out of fear of divine punishment. Contritio, in contrast, was a higher form of remorse that stemmed from love of God, whom one had injured through sin. The question whether attritio sufficed for the remission of sins in confession or whether the higher form of contritio was required. In other words: How high should the spiritual standards for absolution be? Even in the Middle Ages opinions were divided. The Council of Trent accepted ‘imperfect contritio’ in a rather imprecise formula, thus inclining more to attritio, albeit in a moderate and watered-down form – the reason being that Luther had radically called for contritio. In the seventeenth century, the  number of attritioniste predominated by far; in the eighteenth century, however, the contristioniste gained the upper hand in many places, after the French clergy officially took their side in the conflict in 1700. Whoever advocate attritio had to emphasize that absolution took effect by the performance of the sacrament (ex opere operato), independent of the inner disposition of the person giving confession.

A majority of the Jesuits were attrioniste. From the pulpit and in numerous printed books, they defended teir position in sometimes quite heated disputes. Antione Sirmond, for example, argued in his much discussed book of 1641, Defense de a Vertu, that pure love of God (contritio) was not necessary. In response he was fiercely attacked by many contritoniste. Prominent devote theologians like the Abbe de Saint-Cyran wrote against Sirmond, whose publication  they viewed as an affront. Bishop Jean-Baptiste Camus in particular conducted a long literary feud with Sirmond. The Jesuit, for his part, stood his ground and considered demands for contritio unrealistic: the ‘true love’ of God that Camus required, and which acted only out of devotion to God and without any self-interested motives, could not be obtained in this life. For rigorist theologians, though, the Jesuits’ attitude was far too easygoing and ‘lax’ (relache). With their liberality, the Jesuits did not take the drama of sin seriously enough. By accommodating sinners’ needs in the moral teachings, the Jesuits thus supposedly stooped to their level.

Some moral-theological assessments penned by the Jesuits, viewed in isolation, in fact, could give a ridiculously lax impression. The moral theologian Juan Sanchez, for example, argued in 1643, with respect to sexual offenses, that one had to absolve even a repeat offender ‘every time that he does penance, and not only when when one can actually observe an actually observe an improvement [in his behavior].Serious, long-term improvement (emendatio) or a real, permanent change of heart on the part of the confessing sinner was not necessary for absolution. Authors like Sanchez almost seemed to be proclaiming something like a right to the remission of sin. The concept of attritio and confidence in the automatic of the sacrament of confession, without any need for additional spiritual ingredients, peaked in such statements- pure laxity, opponents normally cried in such cases. The Jesuits – according to their rigorist adversaries – all too often took sides with sinners, not with God.

But a much closer look is necessary. Sanchez sup[ported his assessment with reference to Mathew 18:22, the passage in which Jesus teaches his disciples to forgive a sin not just seven times, but even seventy-seven times. In this way, the Spaniard argued, Jesus understood how to deal with ‘our frailty’- one should not expect too much of people. Sanchez also undertook a careful analysis of the circumstances of sinful deeds in his discussion: he asked whether there were any humanly possible alternatives, whether any exculpatory influences should be assumed, what in particular drove or encouraged the sinner to act, and so on. Before handing down moral judgment, in the opinion of Sanchez and many other Jesuits, one first had to evaluate the specific situation and people concerned, with all their weaknesses and influences, which might prove to be mitigating or explanatory circumstances.

There was a system and method to the Jesuits’ moral theology, which largely consisted of the assessment of individual cases (casus). Jesuit ethics was case-driven ethics and thus comprised an expansive body of literature and scholarship on specific moral dilemmas, the equally famous and infamous Jesuit science of casuistry. In 1599, casuistry was embedded in the Ratio studiorum, the official curriculum of all Jesuit colleges; the subject had already been taught for sometime. Soon weekly classes were held everywhere to practice the ‘solution,’ discussion, and moral assessment of individual cases studies. Designated teachers prepared these classes and instructed students in the precise analysis of all relevant details. By 1800, nearly thirteen hundred new books had been published on the subject, most of the authored by Jesuits. Over thousands of pages, these thick folios discussed a variety of more or less everyday cases. They covered questions of marital and sexual ethics, aspects of economic life, inter-confessional relations, military incidents, and much more. The cases were usually anonymized, generalized, and stripped of recognizable particulars. They thus became universal and thereby transferable and applicable to other contexts. In the form of casuistry, a full-fledged method of moral theology was established that now came into its own as an autonomous subject of study, a distinct theological discipline with its own scholarly literature, its own specialists, and its own discursive profile.

With such courses and a growing body of literature, the Jesuits hoped to train spring priests how to interact with confessing sinners, because here seemed to be a shortage of competent confessors who could see sins confessed to them in the right light. Casuistry was thus also part of the reform of the clergy. Casuistry and the boom in confession went hand in hand in the reformed Catholicism of the Jesuits. This pragmatic emphasis, however, often came at the expense of deeper scrutiny of theological questions. In Asturias, it was decided that ‘one should disregard theological matters that do not bear on ethical cases; theological questions should be handled only briefly when a solution of a case depends on them.’ Spiritual questions after pastoral care had been administered were also usually lacking. It is often difficult to find the link between casuistry and the faith, religious practices, and captivating forms of devotion that we encountered in the previous section.*

We may presume that the services of the casuists were in high demand both inside and outside the confessional. Jesuits trained in casuistry and their colleagues obviously served an important purpose as moral-theological consultants in the troubled and contradictory times of the early modern period. Their services were called on again and again. The casuists created moral certainty and relieved one’s conscience. The casus of the Benedictines of Sts. Ulrich and Afra from Augsburg, for example, is transmitted from southern Germany. The monks had sworn loyalty to the (Lutheran) king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, during the chaos of the Thirty Years War. Now  a panel of experts made p of Jesuits was asked to assess their conduct in ethical and canonistic terms. As a scholarly subject, this instruction in ethics was obviously deeply rooted in the social conditions of an age characterized by constant conflicts of loyalty and coercion- Protestants, incidentally, felt the same need, and an extensive tradition of casuistry also took root among them.

In deciding casus, casuists both inside and outside the Society of Jesus relied heavily on the opinions of colleagues who were viewed as expert. Hence, when a casuistic decision had to be made, a large part of it amounted de facto to weighing the positions that established casuists had take in similar cases. For that reason alone, casuistry needed its own specialists, because no one could possibly know all the existing texts and rulings without extensive study. But what should one do when different authors reach a different verdict about the circumstances of the case? Which opinion should one follow in assessing a specific casus?  How could one choose from the abundance of opinions? This was a methodological question at the heart of the whole endeavor, and it was hotly debated for decades. There were three different strategies for choosing from existing opinions: probabilism, probabiliorism, and tutiorism.

A glance at the Latin terms cuts to the heart of the matter –whether one took the ‘probable’ (probabilis), the ‘more probable’ (probabilior), or the ‘safer’ (tutior) opinion. Each of these  approaches revolved around opinions, not absolute, perfect, securely demonstrable ‘mathematical’ truths. Casuist ethics was an ethics for troubled times and uncertain circumstances, an ethics with a high level of ambivalence. The critical question was just how much ambivalence one could tolerate when it was necessary to choose a course of action. One group thought that one presumably acted correctly in choosing the action or opinion that seemed ‘probable.’ The Jesuits, allowing some exceptions, were and are considered firm adherence of this probabilist position, even though probabilism itself was actually invented by a sixteenth-century Dominican, Bartolome de Medina. The Jesuits Heinrich Busembaum, Tommaso Tamburini, and Honore Fabri composed a highly successful work in the probabilist tradition that were regarded as representative of this approach.

Opposite the probabilists could be found the probabiliorists- especially in the Dominicans’ camp, although elsewhere too. They held that one acted correctly when one chose not merely a probable opinion from two or more, but rather the ‘more probable’ opinion. There was a vast difference, they believed, as to whether one should take  a probable or the more probable view. In 1722, a Dominican publicly preached in Reggio el Calabrio that ‘all probabilists are heretics, whose leaders will roast them all in  Hell! – citing Jesuits like Tommasio Tamburini and others by name.

Finally, the tutiorists suggested that one should not focus on probabilities but rather take the course of action that was the ‘safest,’ that is, the option that had the least potential for sin, even if it seemed less ‘probable’ than others.

Countless questions of detail concerning the casuistic method ensued: did the status of an opinion as ‘probable’ have to be certain, or did  it suffice if it was ‘probable – that is to say: Could one also chose a ‘probable probability’? And what exactly made an opinion probable? How many authors had to hold it. And did the mere number of authorities count or rather the weight of the arguments? In the eyes of radical probabalists, it sufficed when a single opinion was probable for someone to take a course of action. In other words, if one could find just a single recognized authority who considered one’s preference to be ‘probable’ then one could follow one’s own inclination with a clear conscience, even if the rest of the world of moral theology was opposed. Such extreme opinions were not the rule in the Society of Jesus, but they occurred. That was grist for the mill of the Jesuits’ enemies, who feared such positions might lead to the collapse of all morality: ‘There is practically nothing left  that would be forbidden to Christians according to the Jesuits, after they made everything probable,’ Antoine Arnauld, one of their harshest critics, wrote in 1641. Many contemporaries agreed with him. What the Jesuits advocated under the cover of ’ethics’ was no ethics at all anymore, so weak and lax were the results.

Arnauld therefore condemned the Jesuits root and branch, but that was far too simplistic: there were countercurrents within the Society of Jesus itself. There were probabiliorists, contritionists, and rigorist Jesuits whose opposition constantly roiled the Society .  .  .

 

*Jesuit forms of devotion in the Baroque period e.g. relics of the Saints, holy water, blessed coins, rosaries, belief in demons and guardian angels, the veneration of Mary, Joseph, the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Sacraments, many of which were controversial even among the Jesuits themselves.